Multilingual

Originally posted on LinkedIN in two parts.
The Government of Canada’s Web Renewal Initiative has failed. It may not be public yet, but there really is no way to redeem this half-conceived initiative to centralize all government pages onto a single website - Canada.ca.
This goal was lifted from the UK Government’s Government Digital Services (GDS). The goal of the GDS team was no less than digital transformation. Our government appears to have mistaken the alpha.gov.uk site as the end goal, rather than a platform with which to experiment with new ideas in government usability. The GDS is...

The Internationalization suite of modules do a pretty good job of making everything translatable in Drupal 7. But, if you're writing a module that stores its data outside variables or entities, you might notice a few gaps.
On a recent project, I noticed that field display settings (field formatter settings for those familiar with the Field API) are not translatable by default. In many cases, this is fine because the field settings in core modules don't make sense to translate: for example, the number of characters to trim a summary at or the image style to use.
Never use t($...

With two back to back Drupal 7 multilingual projects involving unique domains for each language we kept running into the same frustration. Syncing the databases back and forth from local, testing, staging, and live environments in a way that does not require manually going into the database to chage the language domain settings seemed impossible, or at least as elusive as a fox.
All I personally wanted was a simple way to override the language domains depending on the environment I was working on. The easiest way I could imagine would be to set variables in the $conf array within the settings...